iphone 5 preview

Apple hasn't announced a new iPhone yet, but it's safe to assume there'll be one this year. There's been a new iPhone once a year, every year, since Apple introduced it in 2007. The original iPhone was announced in January and shipped in June. iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 were announced in June and shipped shortly thereafter. Last year, Apple switched to October for the iPhone 4S announcement and release, but otherwise didn't skip a beat. Back in July iMore learned that this year the iPhone 5,1 would be announced on September 12 and released on September 21. Apple has since confirmed the announcement date but not yet the release, and despite a steady stream of leaks, nothing is official until an Apple shows it off on stage.

With that in mind, however, we have reason to believe some of those leaks have been accurate. We've gone over them previously in separate articles, but it's worth rounding them up here. That way we can start setting reasonable expectations, even while we wait to be wowed.

One of the most obvious and important physical changes rumored for the new iPhone is a bigger, 4-inch display with a taller, 16:9 aspect ratio that uses thinner in-cell technology. While the 2010 iPhone 4 saw Apple double the pixel density of the iPhone display from 320x480 to 640x960, the physical size and 3:2 aspect ratio stayed the same. If the iPhone 5 is introduced on September 12 with a bigger 640x1136 screen, as we believe it will, for the first time that Apple will have changed the physical size and aspect ratio of an iPhone display.

Apple is expected to announce their next generation iPhone on September 12, 2012, and while there have been a lot of leaks about what it may look like, there have only been a few about what will power it. That's not surprising. Apple seldom gives specifics about the processors inside the iPhone, or any of their iOS devices. They'll typically announce the name of the processor, maybe the number of cores, but they'll mostly just tell us how many times faster it is than the last generation, both in terms of computing and graphical power. And the amount of RAM is has? Forget about it. We'll likely not know the full details about the iPhone 5 processor until after it's launched and after it's been thoroughly torn down by third parties. That's the Apple way. In the meantime, all we can do is speculate based on past behavior and present technology.

The moment rumors of a new Dock port emerged, many expressed hope it would feature a MagSafe-style connector, like Apple's MacBook line of laptops. Symmetrical, it could be plugged in without worrying about up or down, and magnetically coupled for better ease of use. Others simply wanted to make sure all their old Dock accessories would still be compatible and still work.

iMore learned back in March that the next iPhone would have 4G LTE networking. We’ve seen a pretty clear history of Apple integrating technology from the spring iPad release into the summer/fall iteration of the iPhone for the past few years. Last year, that included the A5 processor, 512MB of memory, and 64GB of storage. This year, it seems almost certain it will include LTE.